Sick on Monday; back by Friday – absence

Recent research by Mercer has found that 35% of all sick leave is taken on Mondays but only 3% on Fridays. Which must mean the vast majority of those away on Monday are back in by Friday (if not Tuesday).

Mercer suggest that Monday sickness and frequent short-term absences can be a symptom of low employee engagement and morale. More cynical readers might wonder whether this might better be credited to weekend excess and little fear of the consequences of staying away.

Cynicism apart, the real lesson of this survey is that the sophistication of many HRIS systems makes detailed analyses easier than ever. Mercer extend their own analysis to consider differences between men and women and between full- and part-time staff. But why stop there? Many investigations into absence fail to be useful because they aggregate too many different causes and situations. Modern HRIS systems enable you to avoid that pitfall and the consequent over-generalisations.

Perhaps you should code in all the additional stuff you know about your staff and work out what proportion of the Monday sickies had been playing soccer or rugby at the weekend? Or rock climbing? Or sky diving? You might improve your absence statistics at a stroke by sifting out all those application forms that proudly fill up the ‘other activities’ box with such high-risk pastimes. After all, few train-spotters or embroidery enthusiasts end up in A&E on a Sunday afternoon.

That pay gap again

The announcement last week that the gender pay gap had widened in 2008 brought the usual screams of indignation and demands that the government do something. The HR press was a little more temperate, though not exclusively so. The ONS announcement, of course, gives a much more considered interpretation. I have written before (The gender pay gap) about the need to break the gap down into its constituent causes if any useful progress is to be made so I will just highlight a few interesting aspects.

HR by numbers – measuring workforce performance

The CIPD has announced the latest in its compendium of toolkits. This one is on Human Capital Management (HCM). Mostly I am very impressed with their toolkits. They provide a good deal of clarity and help people understand what the various topics involve (thankfully, without implying that it is so easy that they do not need professional help!). In this case I am not so sure.

It may just be that I have always reacted badly to HCM as a piece of jargon. ‘Human Resources’ as a replacement for ‘personnel’ was meant to imply a wider, less bureaucratic role but soon became just as easy a butt for jokes (and HR is easier to say than personnel) so some tried to achieve the same end by implying that Human Resource Management (HRM) was the ‘something else’ that could take HR to the centre of organisational life. That never found currency outside the HR bubble. Human Capital Management is a term mostly kept away from the workforce, which is just as well as it is meaningless in everyday life. However employee-centred your company’s approach, do you really want to be referred to as piece of ‘capital’ that has to be ‘managed’. So; putting that little rant aside there is a lot of good stuff in the toolkit. So what’s my problem?

Who gets paid overtime

Staff working extra hours for no extra pay is a frequent news topic these days so I was interested to read an ONS statistic that around a quarter of full-time employees work paid overtime and that the median amount is four hours per week. Typically this is paid at time and a half during the week and on Saturdays; double time Sundays and Bank Holidays (sometimes also Saturday afternoon). The parable of the workers in the vineyard never has applied much in the modern world.

This looks very much like the traditional manufacturing pattern that has been around for many years where workers would typically do one or two hours mid-week and a four-hour shift on Saturday mornings (harking back to when men did not help with the shopping and football matches were always at 3pm on Saturday afternoons). I might have expected a greater change.

Of course that was a statistic for full-timers and nowadays there are many more part-time staff who may work extra hours (but at flat rate), people putting in unpaid hours and all those working in 24/7 organisations where weekends and evenings are now simply contractual hours.

Paid overtime needs to be carefully controlled but is a tried and tested mechanism for flexing costs to demand. Used too readily it can simply bloat your cost-base. Used sensibly it helps over-staffing for the base level of demand or too frequent lay-offs. In many ways it is a type of performance-related pay.